Minister of Housing & Urban Affairs Hardeep Singh Puri on Tuesday inaugurated the first of its kind conference of the CEOs of the 'Smart Cities' that aims at cross-sharing of knowledge among the cities. Apart from the Smart City CEOs, the participants include representatives from municipal, state and central government and various other stakeholders in the Smart City Mission from the civil society, academia, industry etc.

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The two-day conference titled First Apex Conference for the CEOs of Smart Cities is being held in Bhopal. Its objective to provide momentum to the cities and a platform for cross-learning, sharing and disseminating the experience gained over the past two and a half years. Other participants include principal secretaries/state mission directors, municipal commissioners, ambassadors of several countries, UN representatives, heads of multilateral/bilateral agencies, civil societies, and capacity building institutes, CEOs, heads of major master system indicator vendors.

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Puri also launched the country's first integrated control and command centre for seven cities of Madhya Pradesh set up in Bhopal. There are a number of functions and systems that shall be managed out of the Command Center Application. Systems and functions can be monitored from one place and it will also have the option of sharing a feed to another agency as required via the platform.

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The command and control centre will be a common platform where all the information from various sources like city operation centres and applications will be stored. All the information collected will be analysed for better planning of smart cities.

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The convergence of all the best practices in Smart city missions across the country on a single platform will help the city leaders to not waste time in 'reinventing the wheel' but use the collective learning to accelerate the progress of work.

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As many as 99 cities have been announced as smart cities so far under the Smart Cities Mission. Each city would get Rs 500 crore as central assistance for implementation of the projects. The value of projects under implementation in August 2017 was about Rs 8,000 crore. After eight months, 930 projects valued at over Rs 30,000 crore are under implementation.